


Static

by Caffeinated_Owlbear



Series: Ozone and Fresh Snow [1]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: AI Handsome Jack - Freeform, AI Jack, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Artificial Intelligence Handsome Jack, Handsome Jack A.I., Hologram Handsome Jack, M/M, Non-Explicit, Some angst, Some trippy sensual stuff, Tales From the Borderlands, Trippy, post-tftbl, very little smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24331093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caffeinated_Owlbear/pseuds/Caffeinated_Owlbear
Summary: “I got no power here except what you give me, kiddo.”Lies. One-hundred-percent correct, accurate, factual lies.“I’m not gonna beg you, Rhysie.” Some of the warm, gentle electricity is stripped from Jack’s voice; a blade cutting through the insulation to show metal underneath; the sting of a live wire. “This was your idea.”Rhys swallows. His mouth is dry.“Initiate limited handover of cybernetic function control.”====Set post-TFBTL, partway through theLost and Foundtimeline.
Relationships: Handsome Jack/Rhys (Borderlands)
Series: Ozone and Fresh Snow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1776886
Comments: 11
Kudos: 104





	Static

**Author's Note:**

> Jack status: AI, post-TFTBL.  
> Current residence: inside Rhys’s head.  
> Number of failsafes and firewalls to protect Rhys: many.  
> Holographic projection: as required/wished for/reluctantly requested.
> 
> Strongly recommend listening to [this instrumental version of Control by Halsey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8_zKrmY2y4) when reading, especially the first part of the story.

* * *

“Do you trust me, Rhysie?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Aw.” Jack’s voice in Rhys’s ear is tinged with hurt so fake that Rhys can hear the smile right through it. That makes it worse, somehow; being openly mocked is something he could get angry at; the thinly veiled smile only serves to send a shiver through him.

Like there’s a shortage of _those_.

“Not even a little bit?” Jack continues.

“No,” Rhys whispers back. “Not at all.”

“In that case… you’re making real bad decisions, kid.” Jack’s voice drops to a whisper to match Rhys.

“I know,” Rhys breathes, so quietly he can’t even hear himself.

With his eyes closed, Rhys becomes more aware of a subtle hum on the very brink of hearing, like an old-style CRT screen, hidden somewhere nearby and out of sight.

Touch a screen like this with your fingers, and you’ll feel almost nothing. Touch it with the back of your hand, and it’ll make your skin tingle. Bring the back of your arm to within a few millimeters of it, and you’ll feel every little hair standing on end, electrified, with the tiniest crackle of static.

No part of Rhys is reaching out for any screens right now. No part of Rhys is even moving. But the backs of his fingers, his left hand, tingle in that unmistakable way as if something has just breathed static on them. It travels upwards, making the hairs on the back of his arm stand up in its wake, all the way up his arm, over the curve of his shoulder, and up his neck, up the side of his face… all the way to the neural port at his temple.

The softly thrumming static circles the neural port. Along the edge where metal meets skin.

“I’m not gonna do anything till you let me, Rhysie…” Jack’s whisper travels through Rhys’s brain, leaving the same trails as his holographic hand has traced up Rhys’s arm.

“It’s the rules, remember…” Each word, quieter. “Verbal authorization.” The quieter the whisper, the stronger the static. “Access override.”

Rhys can feel Jack’s finger still circling his neural port. Clockwise. Then a pause, so shockingly, _painfully_ empty of feeling that Rhys’s breath hitches. Counter-clockwise. Is the static growing warmer, somehow? This makes no sense. Electricity has no temperature. Jack’s finger at his temple… does.

“I got no power here except what you give me, kiddo.”

Lies. One-hundred-percent correct, accurate, factual _lies_.

“I’m not gonna beg you, Rhysie.” Some of the warm, gentle electricity is stripped from Jack’s voice; a blade cutting through the insulation to show metal underneath; the sting of a live wire. “This was your idea.”

Rhys swallows. His mouth is dry.

“Initiate limited handover of cybernetic function control.”

A new trail of static starts from Rhys’s chin downward, tracing the contour of his throat. It leaves a warm pinprick in the dip between his collarbones before beginning the journey back.

“Include: neural and information subsystems.”

One of Jack’s hands continues drawing slow circles on Rhys’s temple. With the other, his fingertips reach the bottom of Rhys’s jaw again, crest the tip of his chin, hover just below Rhys’s bottom lip.

“Exclude: cybernetic limb motor functions.”

Rhys tries not to move his lips as he speaks. Jack’s fingers are tracing the outline of his mouth, then brush both his lips. Menthol chapstick on a cold day. Rhys feels his lips parting. He needs to know if Jack _tastes_ like cold menthol, too.

In his head, Rhys hears the quietest of chuckles, or an exhale, or a sigh. Or maybe he doesn’t hear anything at all. Maybe he’s imagined it. Jack’s fingers taste like ozone and fresh snow.

“Time limit: five minutes zero seconds.”

Two lines of static start a slow crawl from either corner of Rhys’s jaw and up the sides of his face. There’s a thrum at the edges of his eye sockets, a tingle that reaches through his eyelids right into his eyes. Rhys knows that if he opened his eyes right now, he would see nothing but blue.

“Authorization granted by user: Rhys dash Atlas dash one.”

Jack’s hand leaves Rhys’s temple, slips around the back of Rhys’s head, up into Rhys’s hair. His entire scalp _hums_ , as if every hair follicle were vibrating. Jack’s other hand is still resting over Rhys’s eyes.

“Authorization granted to program: Handsome Jack.”

Jack’s thumb and little finger find Rhys’s temples. Two gentle pressure points.

“Access override.”

A spike of electricity, icy hot, temple to temple. Pain and terror and _loss_ , and warmth and safety and _comfort,_ and pleasure and exhilaration and _power,_ and…

Jack.

Rhys’s mouth falls open with a small moan. In his mind, Jack smiles.

* * *

It’s wrong how… right it feels to have Jack inside his mind again. There’s almost no danger to Rhys right now, or as close as you can get to being in no danger while in the same room with Jack.

And it really does feel like being in the same room with him. For practical purposes, very little has changed. The limited authorization, the time cut-off, the denied access to his arm – all these things mean that Jack can’t do much inside Rhys’s mind right now except… _be_ there. Which makes all the difference.

Ever since plugging Jack’s AI into his cybernetics again, Rhys has been _aware_ of Jack in his mind, he’s _known_ Jack was in his mind, but he hasn’t _felt_ him there. The carefully self-contained part of his cybernetics playing host to Jack might as well have been a soundproof glass bubble. See him, but only through the glass. Hear him, but only through the speaker. Never breathe the same air. Never share the same space. Never touch.

Now the glass partition is gone, and Jack’s there, Jack’s _here_ , and it’s like a missing piece of Rhys’s mind is back, a piece he didn’t know was– No, that’s a lie. He’s known that piece was missing, every moment. He’s felt its absence, felt _Jack’s_ absence, like a slipping memory that you can almost remember, like a word that’s on the tip of your tongue.

And now in this moment, and for the next four and a half minutes, everything is _right_ , and it’s so fucked up that _this_ is what counts as right in Rhys’s mind, in Rhys’s _world_ now.

“So… what am I doing here?” asks Jack.

Rhys knows there’s no reason why Jack’s voice should sound different right now, because it’s going through the same cybernetics pathways as before, directly into Rhys’s speech processing center. That knowledge changes nothing.

“Don’t do anything,” Rhys tells Jack. “I’m just running some tests.”

That’s… almost true. Rhys  _ was _ running a test. The test was to check whether the new voice commands work, in case he needs to give Jack access to his subsystems on their upcoming trip to Eden-5. In case of an  _ actual _ emergency. And only then.

And, based on the fact that Jack is in his mind again,  _ really _ in his mind right now, the commands obviously work. Which means there’s no reason Rhys shouldn’t terminate the test right now, put Jack right back into the glass bubble where he belongs.

Yes. There’s no reason for Rhys to wait for the allocated time to elapse. He can cut it short right now. No reason to take the extra risk by spending an extra four minutes with Jack in his mind. An extra four minutes  _ with Jack _ .

No reason at all.

“Don’t get me wrong, cupcake, it’s a nice change of pace. Kinda like stretching your legs after a long drive, or you know how when you’ve been wearing an active shield for a long-ass time? Like, it’s a force field and it’s not touching you, right, so there’s no reason it should change anything you feel _physically_ , well, aside from, you know, bullets _not_ hitting you instead of hitting you. But somehow, you go around with that thing on for a few hours, and then you switch it off, and it’s like – _damn_ , I’ve forgotten what it’s like _not_ to be smothered by a force field.”

Rhys doesn’t interrupt, lets Jack ramble. That makes it more normal, somehow; again, for a thoroughly fucked-up definition of ‘normal’.

It feels like being back on Pandora, thinks Rhys, and then almost wishes Jack _would_ take control of his robot arm and punch him in the face really hard. Of _all_ the fucked-up things going through his mind right now–

–including the one currently rambling about a batch of Hyperion shields that, due to a bug in the digistruct code, made the users taste oranges while the shield was active; as in, they could taste oranges in their mouth, they didn’t _themselves_ taste of oranges, then again, who the hell knows, not like we polled any cannibals; the buggy shields were successfully marketed as a limited edition item, leading to a collector craze–

–being _nostalgic_ for _Pandora_ may just take the cake.

Pandora was horrible, and Rhys was never more than five seconds away from either dying or thinking he was about to die, and never before, or since, has he gotten so battered, physically and emotionally, in the scope of just a few days, but… He and Jack were a team then. They got along. They were this close to being friends, or as close as one could be friends with Jack.

And then Jack ruined everything.

Rhys still has all his memories of that trip. Literally. Preserved in his old ECHO eye, which became safe to use once he’d transferred Jack’s AI out of it. He’s gone over all of them multiple times, and it’s not the funny moments with Vaughn or the bickering with Fiona or even the unexpected but sweet chemistry with Sasha that he’s focused on the most. No. It was every moment with Jack. Replayed over, and over, all but frame-by-frame, actually frame-by-frame, looking for… for proof that Rhys was an idiot from the get-go, maybe. So starstruck, so _smitten_ with the sudden encounter and the even more sudden camaraderie with his _hero_ that he didn’t see things right in front of his nose. Things that Rhys should’ve seen coming. The obvious lies. The manipulation. The promises that Jack never intended to keep.

Rhys had gone over the memories until he physically couldn’t take it anymore. He got nothing. In all of the recorded memories, in every moment where Jack was with Rhys, right up until the override port on Helios jacked in ( _‘jack in, get it?..’_ ) into Rhys’s brain and pulled him out… Jack was sarcastic, crude, threatening, violent, easily excited, even more easily bored… but he’d looked, seemed ( _been??)…_ earnest.

And then he went and ruined everything.

“ _I can see through you.” - “I wasn’t going for subtle there, kiddo.”_

Maybe Rhys really _is_ an idiot. So much of an idiot that Jack didn’t even _need_ to be subtle. Maybe anyone else, anyone who _isn’t_ Rhys, anyone who doesn’t have his _ridiculous_ obsession with Jack and can see Jack for what he is, would take one look at that footage and point out every little thing Rhys has missed. Every smirk, every glance, every inflection that suggested that Jack has been playing him all along.

Maybe that would be better. It would mean that yes, Rhys is an idiot, and yes, this whole thing has been a lie from the first second, but if the whole thing _has_ been a lie from the first second, then nothing _was_ there, nothing _could’ve_ been, there’s nothing to be nostalgic about and nothing to fucking mourn, okay?

That’d be better than knowing that they had… _something_ . And then Jack went and _fucking ruined everything_.

“Just letting you know, thirty seconds left on the override, and I still got no freaking clue what I’m doing here? Don’t tell me this whole thing was supposed to be some sorta trust fall, ‘cause–”

“Shut up, Jack.” Rhys can hear his own voice cracking. He takes a breath. “User: Rhys dash Atlas dash one. Extend time limit of current override by five minutes, zero seconds.”

Jack’s silent for a second or two.

“You sure that’s a good idea, kid?” he says, eventually. “You sound a bit… out of sorts there. Fancy new cybernetics not coping with my code this time? You wanna be careful, ‘cause if you’ve got a critical version conflict there somewhere, that stuff can fuck us _both_ sideways.”

“It’s fine.” Rhys takes another breath. Then sighs. “I’ve tested it all, long before I let you set up camp in my cybernetics. I’m not stupid, Jack.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Rhys hates himself for the way this shittiest not-compliment in the history of the universe makes a small bloom of warmth spread through in his chest.

He doesn’t mean anything by that, Rhys tells himself. This literally means nothing. _Nothing_. Right now, he isn’t even trying to manipulate you. He doesn’t give a shit.

That knowledge changes nothing.

Fuck Jack and his shitty compliments, or lack of. Fuck this _stupid_ idea. Fuck the original moment of weakness that had made Rhys suggest it, and the subsequent moments of weakness that made him go through with it. Fuck every second of the terrifying, exhilarating sensation of static electricity tracing lines across his skin, and the warm circles at his temple, and the taste of ozone and fresh snow on his tongue.

Fuck Jack. And more importantly, fuck _you_ , Rhys, you fucking idiot.

Rhys is ending this. Right now. Cancel the remaining four minutes of the second five-minute span. Never do this again. _Never_.

Rhys opens his mouth to say ‘cancel access override’.

“Hey, Jack,” Rhys hears come out of his mouth, instead, “remember back on Pandora, when you hacked into Vasquez’s car and made it chase him all over the place?”

Jack laughs. Heartily. Earnestly. With the kind of laughter that would fill the entire room, whether a real one, or the metaphorical room of Rhys’s mind in which he and Jack are next to each other, without a pane of glass separating them.

Rhys knows that if he could see Jack right now, Jack’s head would be thrown back, and he’d probably be slapping his knee like a drunk idiot, and once done laughing, he’d wipe some tears from the corners of his eyes and then start talking too soon, and dissolve back into laughter mid-sentence.

“Oh my GOD, cupcake, yeah, I remember that. Wallethead and his car and the– Oh no, I never told you the best part, did I? ‘Cause the best part– The best part–” He starts laughing again.

Rhys waits for Jack to continue. He wants to hate how infectious Jack’s laughter is just now, but can’t quite bring himself to. He allows himself a small chuckle.

“Come on, Jack. What was the best part?”

“The best part…” Jack gasps, thoroughly out of breath. “The best part was that I also hacked his stereo. And I turned up the speakers as high as they’d go. And your old pal Wallethead… Oh god, I can’t deal with this…” Jack starts laughing again.

“Just fucking tell me, Jack!” Rhys snaps, hoping his irritation masks another, bigger chuckle.

Jack takes a deep breath. “Your old pal Wallethead got chased around Pandora to the freaking Benny Hill tune, Rhysie!”

Any remaining shreds of self-control destroyed, Rhys laughs. He laughs till he’s out of breath, till his stomach hurts, till he’s bent in half and gasping for air. Jack’s laughing with him the entire time.

Maybe, thinks Rhys far, far at the back of his mind, maybe it wouldn’t be the _worst_ idea in the world to do this again sometimes. Very bad idea, yes. But maybe not the worst in the world.

For now, there are still two minutes left on the override timer. Rhys wipes the tears from his eyes.

“So you know those mushrooms you hate so much, is there a story there, or what?”

**Author's Note:**

> So I set out to write something trippy and mildly erotic involving AIs, holograms and sharing a mind, and then halfway through, I tripped and fell face first into feels. Thanks for reading!


End file.
